Flickr for Android is a beautiful photo app with a few problems

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How could you say no to a free, terabyte-sized photo bucket to store all of your photos? We can’t either, so we took a look at the new Flickr for Android. It’s a popular photo tool with a large social following, and now it has a brand new Android app to encourage more participation from new users.

One of the advantages to having been around for as long as Flickr is the ability to reinvent yourself and draw in a whole new crowd of users without losing your already sizable community… as long as you do it right. Flickr’s latest announcement of a 1TB storage bucket and brand new Android app are reasons enough to get excited, even if there’s no way you could fill that 1TB with the monthly bandwidth limits on the free accounts.

Once the app is downloaded you can create an account from the homescreen pretty quickly, which is a requirement for using the app. While that’s a bit annoying, you can use a Google, Facebook, or Yahoo account to login. If you don’t have any of these already, the app will walk you through creating a Yahoo account. Once you’ve logged in, you can start taking pictures right away. The app will allow you to post any photo on your phone to Flickr, be it one you’ve already taken or one you took specifically for Flickr — tap the camera app and you’ll be asked which of these two you’d like to do. Choosing a new picture will send you to your camera app, where you can snap your photo, confirm you’d like to use it, and return to the app for editing.

Once you’ve chosen a photo, you’re provided with a handful of pre-made filters that all seem to have arbitrary animal names so you can tell them apart. Narwhal, for example, will cast your photo in a harsh black and white filter with a lot of noise and even more white. Some filters have borders, while others offer tattered edges and sepia tones. If you have the perfect photo already, you can go from filters straight to posting to Flickr, but if you need to do some editing, you have access to a fairly robust editing tool. Crop, balance, color adjustments, red eye correction, and a handful of other tools are immediately at your disposal. It’s no iPhoto, but it gets the job done.

Additionally, this is one of the only screens in the Flickr app that seems aware that you can turn your phone to the side, though while you get a landscape view for editing your photos you will also have a smaller photo to work with. When you’re done messing with your photo you can save and post, where moments later it will be on Flickr for the world to see.

The homescreen for Flickr will show you a grid of photos that are popular of Flickr right now. If you don’t have any friends, you’ll see a ton of content from other people. If you have friends, you’ll get about a 60/40 mix of friends and random Flickr users. It’s never really clear who you are looking at unless you tap on the photos in the grid, and even on a powerful phone this grid can take a few seconds to actually show you anything.